For the few July daily drawings I completed, I started with blind contour drawings. I was playing with various tools – drawing with wooden skewers and plastic stir sticks dipped in black ink with a bit of colour added in ink. The July 2nd drawing is ArtGraf Tailor Chalk on a damp inked surface. The ink and ArtGraf interacted in an interesting manner with a bit of resistance between the two that I quite like. I took a break from daily drawing for most of July and all of August, save for the two drawings below. Now that fall is here I’m back to drawing every day in September and will post the results in early October.

In August of 2016, my son Ben and I started writing an interactive story called “The Legend of the Pockets”. For the longest time, we worked on it very sporadically, but in the last six months, it has become a Friday morning project that we work on at breakfast before our days begin. Although we may be consistently adding to it, the story is anything but consistent. And is nowhere near finished. It is quirky and strange and may even be somewhat amusing, but you will have to be the judge of that yourself. We have a lot of ideas about how to continue the story and we are open to hearing more suggestions. In the meantime, we are introducing it to the world here. We will be continuing to add to it on an ongoing basis.

Please feel free to leave any feedback and ideas as comments below. We hope you enjoy it.

August drawings complete and posted. And once again I have spent the month mainly drawing a small number of objects in isolation and under harsh lighting. I’m trying to move out of my comfort zone in September – we’ll see how that goes when I post those drawings in October.

And on September 24, I will be posting a work-in-progress that is completely different from anything I’ve shown here before. It will be interactive, quirky and, hopefully, a fun experiment!

These are some of my warm up drawings from July and August. I think it’s the looser touch that I like here. The July 28th image is very unfinished and rough, but I find the quality of the lines is appealing.

So my February drawing challenge was to draw from photographs using black ink and grey markers. I had thought drawing from photos would be easier, and although the actual drawing was easier as everything is already flattened, I did not enjoy it as much. It was a pain to find images that I liked and I doubt I’ll do it again. The grey markers were to help me notice value more, but it wasn’t until the 13th that I clued in that I needed to shift how I was working and focus on the various values of the forms rather than drawing outlines in black and filling them in with grey. There are a few drawings that I like in the group, quite a lot that I don’t care for and some that I consider cringe-worthy. And that’s ok. It’s an experiment and it’s all good.

What I gained most in February was more ease in jumping in and being less precious about the result. I’ve reached the point where I care less about how each drawing turns out and more about the practice of drawing.

I completed the second and third lessons in my Craftsy class with the result of the third lesson below. And although I understand the point, I’m getting a little tired of painting the same subject over and over. Apparently I have a short attention span. We’ll see what lesson four brings.

When I did my drawing a day project back in July, I decided to use the same medium all month – black drawing pens and a bit of watercolour. I used a small watercolour sketchbook to work in that had 28 pages to which I added 3 more small sheets that I tucked in the back to contain the entire month’s work. I’m carrying both of these ideas over into this new project. I’m using a 2017 Moleskine planner set that consists of 12 small 3.5 x 5 soft cover books. Each has a different colour cover and a page for each day and they can all be contained in a hardcover. The lines on the pages don’t bother me, but the show-through from one page to the next does. So I’m experimenting with gessoing every second spread to avoid that. For the month of January I’ve chosen graphite as my medium. It’s been awhile since I’ve messed with graphite and I’m enjoying it so far. I’m not as fond of the way the graphite responds to the gesso on the pages, but I’m working with it and trying different things – sanding the gesso a little and using harder pencils, or just dispensing with the gesso and accepting whatever show through results. So far it’s going well. Two weeks in, 50 to go.

This is a group of three panels that currently don’t look like much, but will hopefully evolve into something interesting. I want to play a little with shallow space, text and layers. I’ve started them in acrylic, but will shift to oils with cold wax medium to see if I can work with translucency as well. I have a lovely vision – time will tell how close I manage to come to what is in my head.

With the beginning of the new year, I’m full of ambition. I want to make 2017 a more prolific year than I’ve had for awhile and I am focussing both on developing skills and on experimentation. This isn’t anything new, but I have a renewed energy to bring it about. I intend to draw daily this year and post at least some of the images to Instagram and some here as well from time to time. When I look around my studio I see too many unfinished pieces, so I will be trying to finish work on them. And I seem to have developed a habit of painting over canvases and boards repeatedly if I’m not fond of how they look – again – this idea of layers that I find intriguing. We’ll see what other trends come out of the year. It’s a new year and I feel there are endless possibilities ahead. We’ll see how they unfold…